Alison Frankel

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AstraZeneca’s approach to the 28,000-case litigation over its antipsychotic Seroquel has been notable for two things. First, the pharma company was incredibly successful in court. It won pre-trial dismissal of hundreds of state and federal suits blaming Seroquel for causing diabetes and more serious injuries and got a defense verdict in the one Seroquel case that made it to trial. Second, AZ has been notoriously secretive about settling the remaining cases. AZ reached private deals with plaintiffs firms that controlled big Seroquel dockets, offering token amounts of money to plaintiffs in exchange for their lawyers agreeing to drop out of the litigation. The company disclosed settlements in blocks, finally announcing in late July that it had reached agreements in principle to resolve all but 250 Seroquel suits for a total of $647 million — a small fraction of what plaintiffs lawyers once hoped they’d get.

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Alison Frankel updates On the Case multiple times throughout the day on WestlawNext Practitioner Insights. A founding editor of the Litigation Daily, she has covered big-ticket litigation for more than 20 years. Frankel’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, The American Lawyer and several other national publications. She is also the author of Double Eagle: The Epic Story of the World’s Most Valuable Coin.